Past EXHIBITION
Fanny Sanin: Thresholds For Contemplation
Dec 2, 2022—Apr 15, 2023
For over five decades, Fanny Sanín has inhabited an autonomous creative universe wherefrom she has extracted one-off colors to construct forms as unique as they are singularly her own.
Sanín is not interested in comparisons or descriptions but rather in a penetrating understanding of the work to which she has devoted her entire life. Undoubtedly, critics consider her the most prominent geometric abstraction artist in Colombia and one of the great Latin American “geometers” of the 20th century: “The most outstanding geometer of her generation in her country of origin,”1 was also, with Helen Escobedo and Mira Landau, as James Oles affirms, one of the “most audacious pioneers of geometric abstraction” in Mexico in the late 1960s.2 Esteban García Brosseau has rightly reinstated her presence in Mexico’s history of art through her close relationship with the artists of the Ruptura, and he has stated that the expression “glacial spark” used by Octavio Paz to define the work of precursor Gunther Gerzso “could very well apply to Sanín’s painting.”3
Anna Sokoloff, trustee of the Fanny Sanín Legacy Project, defines the artist’s work as “a tribute to perseverance, rigor and respect for color.”4 Edward Sullivan in turn recalls how Sanín and Lilia Carrillo—also an “intriguing and important figure in the complex and still under-researched subject of mid-twentieth-century abstract art in Mexico”5—“exchanged ideas and most likely discussed their mutual engagement with poetic abstraction.”6 And many decades after this pioneering work—which later paved the way for a new geometry of her own, concrete geometry, one not any less sensitive for it—we may assert with Sullivan that “Fanny Sanín’s trajectory has been one of singular dedication to a method and style” quite unmistakable.7 Beverly Adams echoes this point when she states that Sanín, from the outset of her career to date, has characterized herself by creating against prevailing currents and tendencies.8
Thinking of her “exquisite, immensely accomplished, large-scale and carefully constructed art,”9 Edward Sullivan points out that “fortunately, we are living in an era of renewed art historical revisionism, occasioning a more logical acceptance and thoughtful openness to artists like Sanín who have labored for decades as integral parts of the New York art world.”10 Clayton Kirking calls Fanny Sanín “a sublime master of color”11; José Roca emphasizes that her work represents “one of the most solid and consistent investigations”12 in a “self-referential and concrete” search13 that flows into an art form capable of producing, incessantly, a “gradual bedazzlement.”14
Because her art arises from the contemplative exercise of transiting through her interior world, and demands it of our gaze in turn, we need to understand what Tobias Ostrander has concluded: that her “abstractions conjure perceptual states that transcend time.”15 Only then is it possible to cross the thresholds for contemplation that her art opens up.
Selected Artworks
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